Peter Jackson column: Jonathan Davies loses his mentor and Wales lose a star

A beacon of pure brilliance went out shortly before midnight on Thursday.    Peter Corrigan, for so long a permanent fixture among the hierarchy in the Premier League of sports journalists, passed away after a courageous fight against cancer.
Nobody beyond his family and inner circle of life-long friends will mourn his loss more than the rugby player whose cause he championed like no other, Jonathan Davies. Contrary to popular opinion, the last of the magical Welsh fly-halves did not make his brave venture into hostile Rugby League country entirely on his own.
Peter Corrigan, below, went with him every step of the way.  A constant fount of wisdom, he shared the young man’s anxiety, helped him survive the slings and arrows not by lending an occasional ear but by literally living every moment of his often traumatic conversion to a whole new ball game.
“Peter was my mentor, a lovely, lovely man, a great friend and ally,” Davies told The Rugby Paper.  “After I’d gone north, he lived with me for six weeks.   He was always there to share the pressure as if he felt every blow.”
‘Jiffy’ has good reason to be thankful. It was Corrigan who laid the foundations of his protégé’s media career, writing Davies’ first weekly column, for The Independent. Nobody could have wished for a finer ghost than a reporter who had risen from the ranks of a copy boy on the South Wales Echo in his native Cardiff and climbed all the way to Fleet Street.
Once there he spread his talent across the full spectrum of the nationals, from the Daily Herald to the old, pre-Murdoch Sun, from the Daily Mail to The Guardian, The People to The Observer.  At The Observer, in between stints as football and golf correspondent, he edited the sports pages for ten years and, on occasions, edited the whole paper.
He found time to write books which is how his friendship with Davies began, their collaboration on the first of two autobiographies coinciding with the player’s controversial leap across the Rubicon from Union to League in 1989 for a then world-record fee of almost £200,000.
It was typical of Peter’s unstinting generosity that he saw it as a labour of love.
“I could never have put my thoughts into words the way Peter did,” Davies said. “He, more than anyone, gave me an insight into journalism and made me appreciate his fantastic writing skills.
“I was lucky to have his wonderful support. He was brilliant company and had a natural wit to go with his great knowledge and wonderful stories of his time in sport.
“When I started work in television, I’d always ring him up and ask: ‘What did you think?’ He would be critical in a constructive way. He’d point out how many times I’d repeated myself and taught me to sharpen up. I can never thank him enough.”
They had lunch together round the corner from Corrigan’s home in Penarth one day last month. Neither was to know that it would be the last supper, that the cancer Corrigan thought he had beaten four years ago would return to take its terrible toll.
By then, of course, he had built a large cult following through The Hacker, a newspaper and on-line column in praise of hopeless golfers the world over. The greatest of all golf writers, the late Peter Dobereiner of The Observer, likened Corrigan’s swing to ‘a policeman trying to break down a door’.
His hilarious tales of misadventure in trying to hack his way round in fewer than 100 shots made him in demand as an after-dinner speaker. “You know, some days I feel as though I’m cracking it,” he’d say.
“I look at my card and see a load of sixes, a fair few sevens and even a five.
“Then on other days, I’m complete rubbish…”
A past captain of Glamorganshire Golf Club and president at the time of his death, he took great pride from the achievements of his daughter Sally Ann and son James from their respective careers in policing and journalism.
James, The Daily Telegraph’s golf correspondent and rugby writer, had barely landed for the US Open at Oakmont, Pennsylvania than his father’s condition took a critical turn for the worse.
He made it back to the Marie Cure hospice at Holme Tower overlooking the Bristol Channel in time to join his dad for the match both had been waiting for all their lives, Wales against England at the Euros.
Hours later, Wales had lost infinitely more than a game of football as underlined by the immediate sorrow throughout sport in Wales and beyond at the news of Corrigan, senior’s passing. He is survived by his ex-wife, Beverley, brothers Terry and Chris, daughter Sally Ann, son James, daughter-in-law Laura, son-in-law Eddie and grandson Paddy.
Peter Corrigan, born October 25, 1935 – reporter, stylist, raconteur, author, humourist, hacker and inspiration – died June 16, 2016. A cut above the rest.